Harriet Harriss
Spaces of Solastalgia
Through partnership with the Institute for Public Architecture, this design research explores what the spaces of Solastalgia (comfort from climate grief) - could look like. Visitors are invited to experientially engage with the impact of ecological collapse, and multi-species loss - and, to confront questions of their own mortality, too.
The work visually elucidates on its methodologies as much as its spatial hypotheses, providing a research road map that contextualizes the more often grief-denying traditions of the ‘West’ within a broader canvas of global rituals and ceremonies that situate humans as part of nature and not separate from it. The work also contends that by creating spaces dedicated to experience climate grief and eco-anxiety, we can better alchemise suffering and loss into gratitude and peace, during this transitory moment of death and life in the middle of the sixth mass extinction.
Spaces of Solastalgia - Residency
The residency ‘Spaces of Solastalgia,’ explored comfort in the face of climate grief by presenting four near-future solastalgic scenarios, using Governors Island as a prototypical test site.
The first solastalgic space invites but also requires humans to pollinate plants, due to the decline and collapse of our pollinator species, which include bees, birds, rats, bats, lizards and a variety of insects.
The second offers a multi-species grieving space for mourning with & for birds - a million of which die each year colliding with NYC’s buildings, and a billion across the country. It also proposes an addendum to nyc policy s.7098/a.7808 to make retrofitting nyc’s bird-killing skyscrapers mandatory.
The third scenario envisions a strategy for aqua-composting New Yorkers via sea burial (legal in New York) as a means to reinstate reefs, protect the city against storm surges and flooding, and avoid the 15,000 tons of carbon generated by cremating NY’ers each year. By using readily available oyster shells and kelp to create funeral shrouds, human bodies would weighted to rest on the sea bed and consumed within a matter of weeks.
And, the fourth and final solastalgic scenario envisages resurrecting a first-peoples tradition of elevated burials with composted humans (legal in NYC since 2023) providing nutrients to edible plants that will be needed when Governors Island eventually floods and only 3500 skeletal trees remain as a growing scaffold.
Exhibition...
Opening 17 August 2024The work contends that by creating spaces where humans - and potentially other species - can come together to find comfort from climate grief, we can alleviate our collective suffering and loss and experience new forms of gratitude, acceptance and peace, during this transitory moment of life and death in the middle of the sixth mass extinction.
Spaces of Solastalgia - Teach In...
28 February 2025 This one-day teach-in explored practical and philosophical, individual and collective ways to engage with grief, loss, anger, and mourning caused by climate collapse. With over two-thirds of Americans experiencing climate-related grief or eco-anxiety (APA), conventional mono-disciplinary, techno-utopian responses often fail to acknowledge what is already lost.Convened by Pratt faculty and visiting scholars across disciplines, this interdisciplinary, intersectionality-informed event offered a heart-centered space to reflect on coping with climate collapse. Participants considered non-cerebral, creative approaches, and examine whether fields—from architecture and historic preservation to philosophy and the arts—may unintentionally contribute to greenwashing in climate action.